The death of journals can’t come soon enough.

Comments(5)

Dale Saran

March 5, 2018

“There have been two Cochran reviews of peer review…they both conclude that there isn’t evidence of effectiveness… So we don’t have the upside, but there is a pretty considerable downside… ‘If peer review [were] a drug, it would never get onto the market.'” – Richard Smith (the last quoting Drummond)

That’s an amazing video. That it only has 525 views or so is the shame of scientific publishing. As he points out, not only is peer review useless and ineffective – which would just make it a pointless waste of time for academics and not the rest of our problem – but it is responsible for setting the agenda in the academe and broader scientific community, largely pushed by pharma, used as a means to get drugs to market, handsomely profitable, while simultaneously pushing dreck out into the world as “science.”

Holden MacRae

March 7, 2018

Good points Dale, and yes, I was very surprised at the very low number of views. I know that medical journals are largely controlled by outside interests, viz. pharma, and, that Smith feels that the field of epidemiology is under the same influence. That is very troubling since much of public health policy making is based on epidemiological reports/studies.

The journals I read are primarily in physiology, metabolism, and exercise and sports science. Many of those also take “sponsorship” monies from companies with an agenda to sell their product (pharma, big soda etc). Thus, even scientists in non-medical disciplines are implicitly or explicitly under the influence of such “sponsorship”.

He did mention BMJ as an outlier. I feel they are moving in the right direction to correct the many flaws endemic to scientific publications.

Finally, journals are not going away any time soon – follow the money.

I was very interested to learn that intense publish-or-perish pressures actually created an industry in which some journals now require academics and universities to pay for publication. It seems like an opportunistic development that might even be called predatory, and it certainly increases the risk of publishing bad research simply because someone submitted a manuscript and wrote the right number on a check.

Lon details several other issues with academic publishing, including peer-review situations in which the reviewers are completely unqualified: “A problem with exercise-science journals is that the pressure to publish and provide service creates a situation in which clinically trained or professionally trained doctorates (these are not traditional research-intensive degrees) are called on to peer-review the research of others without having the training or experience to do so with a high degree of rigor or competence.”

Overall, the scenario Lon describes is very concerning, but I took some consolation from his closing paragraph, which points to the discussions happening on this site:

“Finally, we cannot shy away from questioning those who purport to be experts when there appears to be a problem. We have to be ready to act as ethical watchdogs who demand integrity in publication. Our clients, our peers, our businesses and our profession can only benefit when we do.”

Jennifer Crichton

March 11, 2018

I was also surprised at the low number of views. Perhaps reflective of the inertia present in scientific research – don’t slow down, keep publishing, keep growing your CV – without giving pause to the flaws of the process. Smith’s illustration of how antiquated some journals have become makes me think of them now as Rube Goldberg machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine).

Great discussion re: transparency. You’d think, as organizations that have great potential to impact on clinical practice, public health policy, etc., that there would be more demand for financial transparency from journals. The example of a 37% (!) profit margin from Elsevier is rather shocking!

Universities are really getting the short end of the stick in this whole process. Their researchers spend significant time and energy to get a study published in the first place. The university then ends up paying out large sums of money to publishers for license agreements to provide students with access to these resources.

Smith makes a fantastic point that there should be a basic expectation that all research, negative and positive, from publicly funded grants should be made publicly available and widely accessible.